Sunday, September 30, 2012

No Limits

Jealousy
(as Britain’s Queen Alexandra famously said 102 years ago) is the source of so
many problems in life.

Well,
you don’t need me to tell you that – or that there is plenty of jealousy in the
world. And, evidently, there was plenty of it around in the Gospel story we
just heard [Mark 9:38-43, 47-48] – as evidenced by the disciples’ angry reaction
to the unnamed “someone” they had caught casting out devils in Jesus’ name, as
well as in the earlier Old Testament story highlighting Joshua’s jealous reaction to Eldad
and Medad prophesying in the camp. I
think we can all recognize some of ourselves in the behavior of both Joshua and
Jesus’ disciples. Jesus’ startling response – like that of Moses before him –
seems to go against what we can all recognize as one of our most ordinary and
deeply embedded patterns of human behavior.

As
we have been hearing now for the past several Sundays, Jesus has been
instructing his disciples for some time about what was going to happen when
they got to Jerusalem – and what that experience should translate into in terms
of their own attitudes. Yet the impression one gets over and over again – in
the Gospels as in ordinary life, when things get repeated over and over, there
is usually a reason, an instructional purpose – the impression one gets is that
the disciples just don’t get it. On the contrary, we see them again focused on
themselves, on being insiders, on being important members of a prestigious and
powerful inner circle – powerful enough, presumably, at least to make it
through life with both hands, both feet, and both eyes intact!

Like
members of any adolescent clique (or any adult one), the disciples seem
obsessed with distinguishing who’s in from who’s out, who’s up
from who’s down, who’s rich from who’s poor, who’s smart
from who’s dumb, who dresses well from who doesn’t, who’s cool
from who’s not - and equally obsessed with having it all without
having to sacrifice anything, let alone a hand, a foot, or an eye. Sound
familiar?

Of
course, in the world we human beings have built for ourselves, our world works
best by building barriers, something we are forever doing at every level.
That’s who we are. It expresses what we want and determines how we act – in our
relationships, in our careers, whatever.

The
good news of the Gospel is that by his life (and above all by his death) Jesus
has liberated us from this deep-seated, but ultimately enslaving and
self-destructive need to be forever comparing ourselves, to be forever in
competition, to be forever keeping score, counting our possessions and
calculating our coolness. Jesus challenges us to free ourselves from this
unending universal human obsession about ourselves, about us.

And,
of course, all those things we want for ourselves all come in limited
quantities. That’s presumably a big part of their appeal. To the extent that I
get a lot, someone else gets less, a little, or nothing at all. That’s the
essential reality of economic and political life, which is why economic and
political life are so largely about conflict, because the reality is
that there really is never enough of all the stuff we want – certainly not
enough for everyone! And, as the 2nd Reading [James 5:1-6] reminds
us, those at the top of the economic pyramid tend to try to guarantee that it
stays that way. So the perennial task of
economic systems and governments is to figure out how most satisfactorily to
allocate all those scarce, limited benefits that we all so desire.

The
kingdom of God, however, is not like that and has no such limits. It has room
enough for all of us. It’s the ultimate (and perhaps the only) genuinely
“win-win” situation. But it also entails a completely novel and completely
unique notion of what winning means, enabling us to accomplish mighty deeds in
God’s name, transforming our “lose-lose” world into something we would
otherwise never have been able even to imagine.

So,
while we would all much rather spend our energy vainly competing to accumulate
more hands, more feet, more eyes – tangible ones like wealth, power, and
status, and those equally elusive if less tangible ones like affirmation,
respect, and love – as if our lives were ever really our own, Jesus is
challenging us (as only he can) to feel, to walk, and to see our way
through life with his hands, his feet, and his eyes – and so to
feel, to walk, and to see things his way.

Homily for the 26th
Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, September
30, 2012.

About Me

Rev. Ronald Franco, CSP, is a member of the Missionary Society of Saint Paul the Apostle (The Paulist Fathers) and Vice-Postulator for the Canonization Cause of Paulist Founder, Isaac Hecker. He is Pastor of Immaculate Conception Parish, Knoxville, TN,